


Scars Like Wings

by hereticalvision



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Angst and Romance, Angst with a Happy Ending, Ben Solo Deserved Better, Ben Solo Needs A Hug, Catharsis, Devoted Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Explores a whole bunch of ideas the film introduced then left hanging, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Dyad (Star Wars), I Made Myself Cry, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I stan Rian, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Redeemed Ben Solo, Rey Needs A Hug, Rey gets to grieve, Soulmates, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fix-It, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, Tros fix-it, Working Out My Feelings Through Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-25 07:42:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22152478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hereticalvision/pseuds/hereticalvision
Summary: Ben is a presence Rey cannot reach; the physicality of their bond now only tears on her face when she wakes.After Exegol, Rey cannot feel Ben in the Force any more. Unable to accept that he is truly gone, she returns to Ahch-To in an attempt to reignite their connection.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 24
Kudos: 190
Collections: Reylo Prompt Fills (@reylo_prompts), TROS Reylo Fix-it Fics





	Scars Like Wings

**Author's Note:**

> It's hard to think about how excited I was for TRoS - until I saw it. I had soooo many feelings to work out - this fic is the result. Helped along by [this](https://twitter.com/reylo_prompts/status/1212460734560403457) Reylo Prompt, thank you for giving me a focus to begin my catharsis.
> 
> Huge thanks to Fictionalist, as always, for reading my huge ranting emails and my absolutely awful first drafts. Love you boo!

Rey tries not to, but she blames herself.

She keeps seeing herself and Ben on the Sith throne. She doesn’t know if it was really her in the vision or some future where her body had been taken over by her grandfather-destroyer. Or if it was both of them together in some peculiar hybrid – all the Sith made flesh. That thought makes her skin crawl. That thought is a nightmare equaled only by the loss of Ben.

She does know that in this future, Ben would have been alive. He is dead because she refused to turn. And she _knows_ it was the right decision, and the consequence of Ben’s decisions are not hers to bear but…

The love of her life gave his life for hers. How is she supposed to live with that?

Rey might have held his body in her arms for hours if he hadn’t faded to nothing right in front of her eyes. She was so shocked that she couldn’t even call out to him – it all happened so fast. One moment she was tracing his smile, the first from him she’d ever seen, and then…

Her first, selfish thought was _don’t leave me alone like this!_ And then she couldn’t think at all, confused by the terrible fear that if he was gone, they all might be gone. She sprinted back to the X-wing, unable to believe that she wasn’t all alone again until her face was pressed into Finn’s neck and her hand was clasped firmly in Poe’s and she could breathe them both in and feel them in the Force and know it was safe to cry.

She cried for a long time after that. For her parents, for Leia, but most of all for Ben.

There was no one left who would understand that loss – no one who had understood anything she’d had with Ben. She’d tried to explain herself once to the others after Crait, tried to tell them how she’d reached out, hoping she could bring him back. Finn had looked uneasy at best; Poe remembered the way Kylo Ren had tortured him. The closest to understanding was Rose, but Rose had her own losses and resentments.

What to say now? How to explain a dyad in the Force when she barely understood what it meant, to people who would always remember Kylo Ren as the face of their nightmares? The enemy died on Kef Bir. It was her beloved Ben who died on Exegol and none of her friends ever knew him.

Finn had told her what Rose had said: saving what they loved is how they would win. Rey fixated on that idea. Finn and Poe were safe now, in as much as anyone was safe in this turbulent galaxy. She was glad of it, of course, loved them both, but it was Ben who had been the other half of her very soul. Had she saved him, if he was dead? Had they won?

Rey understands better than most the importance of knowing when to let go and when to hold on. She put her focus on constructing her own lightsaber, an intimate act of growing into herself.

She tried to put the past to rest on Tatooine, burying the Skywalker lightsabers at Luke’s first home, since Leia’s had been destroyed so long ago. She saw the two of them in the Force and felt that sense of connection and belonging once again, and smiled. She had learned so much from their teachings even if she had grown beyond their own relationships with the Force.

But she never saw Ben.

It ate at her. If he was dead, if he had gone into the Force then why did she never see him? Why wouldn’t he speak to her? If Master Skywalker had been right and no one was ever really gone then why couldn’t she sense him any more?

All she could think was that she never got to say goodbye.

Rey just wanted to know he was at peace. She believed he could be, remembering the way he’d smiled, seeming to accept his fate, but how could she be certain when she could feel nothing of him, nothing at all? Sometimes the lack of him in the Force, the gnawing absence at the other end of the bond brought her to her knees.

She might have been able to live with it if she’d just known he was with at least one of the only other people in the galaxy who’d even tried to love him. Or perhaps that was just a lie she told herself because her heart was broken and she didn’t know how to move past it. It was a constant pain, knowing he was dead, not knowing where he had gone. If he had become one with the Force then _why couldn’t she feel him?_

She thought she might dream of him sometimes. But even in dreams, she dreams of his absence. There is only ever a flash of dark hair rounding a corner on the Falcon, a black cape in the corner of her room. Ben is always a presence she cannot reach; the physicality of their bond now only tears on her face when she wakes.

There is never certainty on these wakings. Only the loss and the silence.

It might seem odd that it was to Ahch-To she returned in search of Ben. The first time she went there to learn how to destroy Kylo Ren; the second, after all but killing him, determined to die there. But it is where Rey was when she and Ben first touched through the Force. Where she came to understand that he was more than a monster. Where he told her she was not alone, and she believed him.

There is one more thing, one more thing she has told no one. Rey knows that she was dead on Exegol. But she didn’t fade into the Force – no, instead she distinctly remembers waking in the mirror cave, staring down the line at a hundred iterations of her past and present selves. She had no idea what she was doing there, didn’t know if she should walk into one of them to be back in her body or if now was the time to rest.

Before she made a decision, she felt Ben calling her and returned without quite knowing how.

The Ahch-To caretakers are far from enthusiastic to see her again, but do not hinder her as she sets up camp in one of the stone huts she’d used before. The porgs are rather happier, or rather as curious as ever. They dart around the Falcon as though welcoming Rey home. She watches them flutter and the sea birds fly above and remembers her dreams of flying, before BB8 rolled into her life and everything changed.

She smiles, and tries to remember if there had been birds on Jakku. An odd thing to have forgotten but perhaps the scars that place left on her are fading at last.

On the first night she makes a pilgrimage of sorts to where she had burned Kylo Ren’s Silencer. The wind and water had cut the remaining structure down to virtually nothing but there was still an echo of him there anyway, some sense of the way he had carried himself. The way he’d looked almost happy when he’d told her she couldn’t go back to Leia, prepared to settle for any circumstances that would bring them to the same side. Prepared to reclaim his old identity to be with her.

She meditates that night, her mind calmer than it has been in quite some time. She can feel him here, smiling at her with that heart-stopping joy and oh, it hurts. He is here but not here.

‘Be with me,’ she whispers.

Through the wall in her mind Ben reaches out as though to tell her that he already is – but he doesn’t appear, doesn’t touch her. It isn’t enough.

Rey dedicates the second day to exploring the Jedi temple. She begins by climbing the hillside to the tree stump where Luke had kept the sacred Jedi texts. It looks as though it somehow caught fire and Rey is grateful to have taken the books before that happened – without them she might never have been able to connect with the Jedi of old. Now, however, there is nothing left of the draw, no residue of what the place had once been. The feeling that drew her here before must have come from the texts themselves; this is nothing more than a burned out hollow.

Rey can relate.

There is more sense of connection to be found on the other side of the island, when she enters the temple itself. She first walks out to the ledge where Master Skywalker pressed her hand to the ground. She can feel him out there – it must be where he reopened his connection to the Force.

A thought occurs. Has Ben closed himself off, as Master Skywalker had?

Everything inside her revolts at the thought. Why would he do such a thing? She needs to move, to burn off some of the agitation so that she can find her center again but practicing with her staff and her saber only do so much.

Rey works her body until her muscles scream and her eyes ache from the sun. At last she extinguishes her blade and reenters the temple. She finds herself staring for a long time into the pool of water at the mosaic of the Prime Jedi.

She noticed it before but realizes now that the figure is not what she would have expected when she began this journey. The figure sits in meditation, of course, but it is not a being of pure light. The Prime Jedi is half dark surrounded by light, half light enclosed by the dark. There is a light moon and a dark sun. The blade is half-white, like the saber she constructed with her own hands; the other half is black.

It was, she is sure, Anakin Skywalker of all people who told her to _bring back the balance as I did_. Rey is not a philosopher or a scholar. She doesn’t understand, nor pretend to, how the deaths of all those Jedi could have restored balance to the Force. She doesn’t know how to resolve that with her own destruction of ‘all the Sith’ by ‘all the Jedi’.

She does understand this much: she carries the Dark with her still. She refused to hate, still refuses to hate, but that’s not the only path away from the light. There is anger in the heat of the moment, fear of the enemy, fury at loss, terror at its inevitability. She can still feel the lightning spring from her fingers even as she feels the crossed Jedi blades inches from her skin.

So many people have told Rey who she should be. Why is it that she’s still not sure she knows?

The longer she stares into the pool of water, the more she sees Ben’s eyes looking back at her. And she can answer her own question at last – if she thought there was no way back to him, how far would she go to be sure he could go on?

That night Rey meditates, as before. But it isn’t until she’s falling asleep that she whispers, ‘Be with me.’

She sees Ben in a dream, coming back around the corner towards her. He looks exactly as he had when she last saw him – soft black clothes, soft black hair, soft pink mouth. She knows it’s really Ben this time in the way she always knew the ocean in her mind was real when she pictured it from Jakku despite never having seen more water than the drinking troughs at Niima Outpost. She wants to grab hold of him and never let go, but as is often the way in dreams, she is not in full control of her body. Her eyes plead with him.

He only smiles, sadly. ‘People keep telling you they know you,’ he says.

She nods. ‘No one does.’

‘But I do.’

The words strike her hard. ‘You’re not here.’

Ben’s eyes are large and soft and dark as the ocean. He reaches out to place his hand over her heart, the palm flat on her breastbone, his fingertips curling over her clavicle. ‘Yes, I am.’

Rey reaches up to curl her fingers around his wrist, her eyes desperate to look into his forever. Then he is gone and Rey’s mind is a jumble of words and images. Ben’s face when he cut down Snoke. The Force is not a power that you have. A thousand Reys in the mirror, with no one to show her her place. Darkness rises, and the light to meet it. I can see through the cracks in your mask. We had each other, that’s how we won. Your bond… a power like life itself.

There are tears on her face when she wakes. But through them, she can smile at last.

She knows what to do now.

On the morning of the third day, just before dawn, she dives into the pool in the cave beneath the temple.

It is selfish, Rey knows. Selfishness is another route to the dark side, she thinks, but it’s still a chance she has to take.

She wishes she understood what made the difference. She loves her friends but it’s not this clawing, possessive thing which demands and tugs at her. It’s not a joy which could make her take flight or a wound to the soul that can never heal. It is not this compulsion to hold on and to find him, whatever the cost.

The cave offered her the thing she needed before. As a lure, Luke told her. To draw her in and corrupt her. At the time she might have agreed, so confused and hurt by the vision that she couldn’t see it for the gift it was. She had asked to be shown her family and was confronted instead with endless images of herself. She hadn’t understood then but she understands now: it was her choice to make, all along. There is no destiny that cannot be interfered with, corrupted, intercepted, rejected or stolen. There is no certainty – except that Force users often create their own self-fulfilling prophecies.

If she is a Jedi, a soldier for light by choice, then she is still the battleground as all souls are – touched by light and darkness both, struggling each and every day. The war can never be completely won.

She pulls herself out of the cold shock of water to stand on the banks of the cave among the shadows of her other selves – the Reys past and future, the Reys who never were. She walks through them to the mirror and this time when she looks through it, she sees what she wasn’t ready to before but what she knew this time to expect. She couldn’t have understood that first time, wasn’t ready to know that the two shadows on the other side of the opaque glass were Kylo and Kira Ren, the dark couple on the Sith throne. The self-fulfilling prophecy of Ben’s making.

They look at her as she looks at them; Kira sneers. They are terrible in their perfect beauty, destructive and deadly and so in love. But they are not the future. They are the never was. Rey turns her back on them, stands before Kira and places her hand on the mirror. She can hear her other self hissing, but she does not flinch. Instead she strips the leather from her upper arm to reveal the scar he left on her the day Snoke died. This is who they are – and it is inescapable, but not the whole.

She knows now that Ben has been with her, in her heart and mind, all along. She can feel his power now that she’s here, and a thousand echoes of Kylo and Ben join the endless line of other-Reys. And Rey draws on the power of all the Reys and all the Bens that have ever been.

She closes her eyes. The wind is picking up, it is howling all around her, and the other Reys and other Bens are speaking, the Kiras and the Kylos too, there is hissed Sith and there are blessings in Basic. There is a Ben who was always a Jedi, who saved a Kira from Snoke, and they freely offer their power to her to reunite their counterparts. There is a Kylo who didn’t realize how much he loved his Rey until she was dead and now has no hope of his own, just enough grace left to offer what is left of himself to her. There are Bens and Reys from other worlds where they are farmers, nobles, criminals, but always bound together, always fierce in love.

Rey holds out her hand, palm up, the image of how he offered himself to her once, twice before. ‘Be with me,’ she says.

‘Rey,’ his voice comes, but there’s none of the joy she hoped for in his tone. Her eyes fly open to meet his, and his face is full of regret. ‘Rey, I didn’t want this for you. I wanted to you to live.’

Her voice barely shakes when she says, ‘Yes, but I want you.’

Ben swallows, looks away. ‘Do you know all the things I’ve done?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘But I know who you chose to be. _Ben_.’ She waits until he looks at her again, eyes so full of sorrow, her heart full of creeping hope. ‘You don’t atone by giving up. You work at it. And it will be hard, but we can do it together.’

She reaches out her hand again, feeling their power across all the worlds, all for nothing if her Ben won’t take her hand. ‘Please,’ she says, wondering if there’s even half as much emotion in her voice as there was when he said the same thing to her. Wondering what she’ll do if he won’t come with her.

Rey will never be sure whether Ben stepped out from within her or if he’d been in the cave all along. She doesn’t need to be. All she needs to know is the feeling of the skin of his fingers against her hand.

Her eyes fly open and he’s there, Ben as he was when she lost him – a cut below his eye, another below his beautiful mouth. But his face with all its scars is full of so much hope that Rey feels herself begin to weep.

‘I saw you,’ he says, and it’s the hope in his eyes that tells Rey it’s really him, this time. Her Ben, pieced together by the offerings of all the Reys and all the Bens that ever were or could have been – but this one is _hers_. ‘I saw you long before I met you. I knew there would be a girl, and I knew she would be my heart. But I could never have imagined you.’

Rey smiles, bright as morning. ‘I missed you,’ is all she can manage, blessed with none of Ben’s gift for eloquence. ‘So much.’

‘I am with you, always.’ Ben reaches out his hand, all pale skin and long fingers, to trace the shape of her mouth as she traced his before he left her.

‘ _Be with me_ ,’ she whispers again before she kisses him for the second time, the last time, the only time. The darkness is giving way to light and Ben is alive and in her arms and she puts her very self around him, tight as her arms, something she never knew how to do before, doesn’t really know how to do now even as she does it. Something in her is healing and awakening again and this time…

This time Ben stays.


End file.
